The advent of Internet-based electronic commerce in the 1990s spawned the development of online marketplaces, which are increasingly common electronic forums through which customers may place orders for one or more items over the Internet. Online marketplaces enable customers to visit one or more network sites from any corner of the globe, to view and evaluate items, and to place orders for the purchase of such items over the Internet. Initially, orders for items that were placed at online marketplaces over the Internet were fulfilled at the original locations of vendors (or manufacturers, merchants or other sources of the items), from which the items would be shipped to customers via first-class mail or another common carrier.
Online marketplaces soon became victims of their own successes, however, as gains in time or efficiency that were realized through the ease by which customers could place orders for items were soon consumed by losses due to delays in shipping the ordered items from their original locations to customers. Eventually, the growth of online marketplaces, and the rapid expansion in the scope and breadth of their available offerings, led to a concomitant proliferation of fulfillment centers. A fulfillment center is a facility, a warehouse or another like structure that is constructed in a distributed, centralized location and adapted to receive items from sources of the items (e.g., vendors or other fulfillment centers). Fulfillment centers may include stations for receiving shipments of items, for storing such items, and/or for preparing such items for delivery to customers. When an order for the purchase of one or more of the items stored in a fulfillment center is received from a customer, the ordered items may be retrieved from the spaces or areas in which such items are stored, and prepared for delivery to the customer, e.g., by packing the ordered items into one or more appropriate containers with a sufficient type and amount of dunnage, and delivering the containers to a destination designated by the customer.
Online marketplaces and fulfillment centers are engaged in a symbiotic growth pattern that mimics a classic causality dilemma: the popularity of online marketplaces has increased the demand for the distributed storage of items, and increases in the availability of distributed storage have in turn enabled online marketplaces to expand their available offerings. The expansion of offerings that are available at online marketplaces have continued to elevate their popularity and, therefore, have resulted in an ever-increasing demand for more distributed storage. To date, online marketplaces have traditionally responded to increases in the demand for increased storage with the construction of more and more fulfillment centers, with the intent of placing more and more items in locations that are ever closer to customers or other destinations.
The elasticity of the demand for fulfillment centers has its limits, however. In order to accommodate vast numbers and types of items of various sizes, some fulfillment centers may feature storage areas as large as one million square feet or more, and are constructed at a cost of dozens of millions of dollars or more. Because electronic commerce, like traditional commerce, is subject to seasonal fluctuations and typically peaks during year-end holiday seasons, a fulfillment center that is sized to accommodate maximum receiving, storing and distribution flows of items and capacities during peak periods is underutilized during times of reduced demand. Moreover, in locations of high population densities, e.g., cities and other urban areas, real estate values are typically at a premium, and the construction of more and larger fulfillment centers may become cost-prohibitive. Thus, at some point in time, and in many locations, online marketplaces may be forced to search for other ways to improve the distribution of items to such locations, and to respond to increased demands at such locations, at lower costs.
A reciprocal problem typically hinders the efficiency of recycling efforts. In the 1970s and 1980s, municipalities began coordinating recycling with their traditional trash collection systems and methods, with many towns and cities offering curbside collection of recyclables alongside garbage, or accommodating the receipt of recyclables, along with trash, at their transfer stations (e.g., dumps). Municipally-sponsored recycling systems typically sell or donate recyclable materials to companies that reprocess them into a usable form, which may then be resold to manufacturers of products or other end users that require such materials. While such efforts are certainly noble, most recycling systems are financially unprofitable or uneconomical at least because of the numbers of entities that receive or handle recyclable waste, the lengths of time required to process the waste into a valuable end product, or the distances over which the waste must travel before it may be used again.